What makes a human life valuable? Greg Epstein, a humanist chaplain at Harvard, recalls discussing this question with a group of students at the Ivy League university, many of them “deeply anxious about their individual and collective futures” and seeking advice before graduating.

“When I suggested they view themselves as having inherent worth and value, simply for existing, as a baby would, one of the students responded – with laudable honesty and forthrightness – that she found that idea laughable,” he writes.

Epstein has spent the last few years researching the impact of technology on our lives and the roots of modern anxiety. While it has become commonplace to blame the smartphone for all our woes, he believes our relationship with tech needs to be seen in the context of a deeper malaise, a malaise that’s encapsulated in that story.

Many young people are led to believe “that their entire worth as a human being is directly and inexorably tied to proving that they are exceptional”, says Epstein, speaking from Boston by Zoom.

The psychotherapist Alice Miller called this The Drama of the Gifted Child. Parents praise their children for being “smart” or industrious, which may help to raise their standards. But it can leave a lifelong impression that your value as a human being depends on always being more than what you are.

“Tech has taken........

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